Day 2: 1800 hours

Madelyn ate dinner, sitting across from Tiffany.

Her daughter had that Good2Go skill-set that would keep her alive -- something that too many Wizards had to learn the hard way.

So many of them, all friends of hers, had died during the Great Conflict that Madelyn had become numb to it by the time the Treaty of Anaheim had been signed.

Tony "Boom-Boom" Borgia, Timmy the Elf, Lasko Oroskova, and Bal'Zohr the Tucompan, to name only 4.

Boom-Boom got his nickname because every time he tried to cast a Fireball, he'd detonate every internal combustion engine within 100 meters of where he stood.

He was shot in the head execution-style when he'd hooked up with the wrong woman.

Timmy the Elf was an acroplastic dwarf who worked as his namesake every Christmas. The man was not even four feet tall, but was hit with 4 Rocket Propelled Grenades, each of which had been modified to take down a tucompan -- a 9 foot tall ursine humanoid with an especially tough hide. What was left of Timmy after that could have fit in a sandwich bag.

Lasko died when he acted as a distraction, allowing her and all the children at the Marion Academy to get away from a fleet of rebuilt "Antique" H-1 Tomcats as they unloaded enough missiles into it to reduce the entire building to dust and pebbles. He'd been the first to cast Earthen Armor that was at diamond-level density. It took the CFV platoon that had been sent after them everything they had to take him down. Lasko had summoned and animated every rose bush from Loose Park and ordered the flora to kill every Coalition member without mercy, followed by 20 Gordion DireWolves to finish the job.

When they'd found out about this, the entire Schmidt Clan from Mooseville descended upon the State of Colorado like a horde of enraged honeybees. They ended up taking down every Coalition chapterhouse and bunker in under 2 months. It turned out that Lasko had only just gotten married to Aryssa Schmidt the week before. She remembered finding out about that little factoid, and the first words out of her mouth was "Oh Snap!"

Her older sister Janey had died in a cave-in that had buried Madelyn and 22 others, thanks to a lucky rocket hit by Coalition forces, shortly before Colorado had been forcibly converted to the Union Faction by the Schmidts and their allies. Every time she thought about it, and what was done to her friend Spyder, it became a contest with no winners, because she too had suffered because of the Great Conflict, and what it had done to the people of Earth.

The nightmares from all this made for very few restful nights, and Tiffany did what she could, and that did good to take the edge off, but nothing ever made them go away completely.

"Let's play a game?"

"Huh?" Madelyn said.

"Let's play a game. There's a Scrabble game over there. You know how you always want me to play."

"Okay." Madelyn had enough dark memories from the past, the last thing she needed was the chance to stew on them.

POV: Major (Security) Jaynee Adkins, Contempo Extraction Services:

Jaynee entered the kitchen and pressed two contact points on her temple and her eyes shifted from the Eye-Eye Fashyn Eyezz "Lover's Green" to her recently acquired Omni-Vu Multiscanner Retinal Processors. The Omnis were protoypes -- beyond cutting edge and able to track a target by what they left behind -- dead skin cells, bacterial residue, the salt-count in their dried sweat, which was 99.98% accurate to their emotional state and stress-level, and could also indicate how long a body had been dead better than the discovery of certain types of flies around said corpses. The mere idea of the things being on the drawing board was enough to give every CSI on the planet a nurdeegasm, but she actually had one implanted into her eye sockets.

And so at this point she could say that in no uncertain terms that she'd raised the bar on what constituted the term 'Professional'.

Oh yes.

It would take no more than 10 seconds to analyze the particle count, which she relegated to her peripheral vision while she remained focused on the task at hand.

"Hey, check this out: I just found our target's private stash."
He held up a handful of Big Reds and Blue-Backs, high end currency in the New Era.

"Put it back, Dodge. ENH only."

"Yes sir."
He put them back where he found them.

If it wasn't part of the mission parameters, her team didn't do it.
Period.

The analysis from her Omnis came in: According to the micro-particle count in the room, she'd just missed them.

Oops.

"Residuals indicate that she has left recently. Mr. Dodge,"

"Yes Miss Caddie."

"Let's DDM before VC decides to get curious. I don't want anything interesting happening."

"Yes sir."

They left the house just as quietly as when they entered.